"McEwan, always a smart, engaging writer, here takes more than one familiar situation and creates at every turn something new and emotionally rewarding in a way he hasn't done so well since On Chesil Beach (2007)."

In the late summer of 2012, a British judge faces a complex case while dealing with her husband's infidelity in this thoughtful, well-wrought novel.
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"Britain's foremost living novelist has written a book—often as drily funny as it is thoughtful—that somehow both subverts and fulfills every expectation its protagonist has for fiction."

A subtly and sweetly subversive novel which seems more characteristic of its author as it becomes increasingly multilayered and labyrinthine in its masterful manipulation of the relationship(s) between fiction and truth.
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"A sort of middle-class humanist manifesto: when you find yourself fortunate beyond all measure in a random universe, gratitude, generosity, and compassion are a decent response."

An increasingly mellowed but no less gripping McEwan (Atonement, 2002, etc.) portrays a single day in the life of a well-off upper-middle-class Londoner, blessed in every conceivable way.
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McEwan's latest, both powerful and equisite, considers the making of a writer, the dangers and rewards of imagination, and the juncture between innocence and awareness, all set against the late afternoon of an England soon to disappear.
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As in McEwan's last novel, The Innocent (1990), the Berlin Wall plays an important symbolic role in this fictional meditation on evil—a pseudo-memoir written from a post-cold-war perspective.
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"McEwan's clinical account of dismemberment reminds us of the dark imagination displayed in his other work—it's also bound to turn off the wider audience who would otherwise enjoy this clean and clever fiction."

McEwan's latest—his best shot at a popular novel—is something of a departure from his previous work (The Child in Time, The Comfort of Strangers, etc.), but no less skillful in design or execution.
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"Though intensely cinematic, this subtle and complex novel would require a director of like narrative daring and imaginative genius."

With none of his previous delight in things macabre, McEwan sets a story of domestic horror against a disorienting exploration in time, and ends up with a work of remarkable intellectual and political sophistication—his most expansive and passionate fiction to date.
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"So, once again, McEwan seems to be a huge talent constricted by the need to preach, philosophize, or work out private obsessions; and one can only hope that writing beguiling but disappointing essay-stories like this one will free him to write more wide-ranging, full-visioned fiction in the future."

"With three other fragmentary pieces that don't achieve much impact, this slim collection is hardly McEwan at his best (he remains a writer of tremendous style who seems limited by his obsessions), but at the very least it reinforces his position as the Roald DaM for the sexually-eruptive 1970s."

Seven stories by the gifted author of The Cement Garden (1978), who keeps his deadpan cool while twisting male-female relations into lean, macabre parables—a technique that is always intriguing but only occasionally absorbing.
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"If he and his characters can stretch to measure up to that prose, we may be watching a major novelist in the making."

There can be nothing but praise for how Ian McEwan writes: in his short stories (First Love, Last Rites, 1975) and in this new novella, he glories in the secret of how uninflected, almost unbearably lean, plain prose can grip, can scream without a single exclamation point.
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